"I have seen," said Corri widely. "The fellow, you know! Married fellows are an awfully 'liberal education.' This one has been turned into a nurse--among the several penalties of his selection. The treasure is for ever dancing on to wet pavements in thin shoes and sandwiching imbecilities between colds on the chest. He swears you may move the Himalayas sooner than teach a girl of twenty to take care of herself. He told me so with tears in his eyes. I mean to be older than my wife, and she has got to be twenty-eight, so it's necessary to wait a few years. I may be able to support her, too, by then; that's another thing in favour of delay." "I'll represent the matter in the proper light for you on the next occasion." "Do; it's extraordinary that every woman advocates matrimony for every man excepting her own son." "She makes up for it by her efforts on behalf of her own daughter." "Is that from experience?" "Not in the sense you mean; I'm no catch to be chased myself; but I've seen enough to make you sick. The friends see the ceremonies--I see the sequels." "'There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.' But Yorick was an amateur! I should say a horrid profession, in one way; it can't leave a scrap of illusion. What's a complexion to a man who knows all that's going on underneath? I suppose when a girl gives a blush you see a sort of chart of her muscles and remember what produces it." "I knew a physician who used to say he had never cared for any woman who hadn't a fatal disease," replied Kincaid; "how does that go with your theory? She was generally consumptive, I believe." "Do you understand it?" "Pity, I dare say, first. Doctors are men." "Yes, I suppose they are; but somehow one doesn't think of them that way. Between the student and the doctor there's such an enormous gap. It's a stupid idea, but one feels that a doctor marries, as he goes to church on Sunday--because the performance is respectable and expected. Some professions don't make any difference to the man himself; you don't think of an engineer as being different from anybody else; but with Medicine----" "It's true," said Kincaid, "that hardly anybody but a doctor can realise how a doctor feels; his friends don't know. The only writer who ever drew one was George Eliot." "If you're a typical----" "Oh, I wasn't talking about myself; don't take me! When a man's thoughts mean worries, he acquires the habit of keeping them to himself very soon; that is, if he isn't a fool. It isn't calculated to make him popular, but it prevents him becoming a bore." "Out comes your old bugbear! Isn't it possible for you to believe a man's pals may listen to his worries without being bored?" "How many times?" "Oh, damn, whenever they're there!" "No," said Kincaid meditatively, "it isn't. They'd hide the boredom, of course, but he ought to hide the worries. Let a man do his cursing in soliloquies, and grin when it's conversation."